Glass Houses

“Oh dear,” he said weakly. “That wasn’t good.”

And then he slowly collapsed down the wall of the elevator until he was in a sitting position, legs splayed loosely.

“Professor?” Claire lunged forward and hovered over him.

“Heart,” he panted, and then made a choking sound. She loosened his tie. That didn’t seem to help. “Listen. My house. Bookshelf. Black cover. Go.”

“Professor, relax, it’s okay—”

“No. Can’t let them have it. Bookshelf. Black—”

His eyes got very wide, and his back arched, and she heard him make an awful noise, and then…

Then he just died. Nothing dramatic about it, no big speeches, no music swelling to tell her how to feel about it. He was just…gone, and even though she pressed her shaking fingers to his neck, she knew she wouldn’t feel anything, because there was something different about him. He was like a rubber doll, not a person.

The elevator doors opened. Claire gasped, grabbed her books and the empty silver canister, and sprinted down the blank cinder-block hallway to the end, where a fire door opened into bright afternoon sunlight.

She stood there for a few long seconds, just shaking and gasping and crying, and then tried to think where to go. Angela and John thought her name was Neuberg, which was good—she supposed not so good for Neuberg, if one existed—but they’d find out who she was eventually. She needed to be home before that happened.

Bookshelf. Black cover.

Professor Wilson had been in that room for seven years, sorting through books. Probably slipping out those he thought might be worth something on the black market.

What if…?

No. It couldn’t be.

Except…what if it was? What if a year ago, or five years ago, Professor Wilson had found that book the vampires were so intent on having, and decided to hang on to it for a rainy day? After all, she’d been basically pla

She needed his address.

It wasn’t far to the Communication Arts Building, and she ran as much of the way as she could before the pain in her still-bruised ankle and still-raw back made her slow down. Two flights of steps brought her to the offices, and she passed up Professor Wilson’s closed and locked office to stop next to the cluttered desk out in the open between the corridors. The nameplate read VIVIAN SAMSON, but everyone just called her Dragon Lady, and the woman sitting behind it had earned the name. She was old, fat, and legendarily bad-tempered. There was no smoking in all university buildings, but the Dragon Lady had an overflowing ashtray on the corner of her desk and a glowing cigarette hanging out of the corner of her red-painted lips. Beehive hair, straight out of old movies. She had a computer, but it wasn’t turned on, and as far as Claire could tell from the two-inch-long bright red nails, the Dragon Lady didn’t type, either.

She ignored Claire and kept on reading the magazine open in front of her.

“Um—excuse me?” Claire asked. She felt sticky with sweat from the run in the heat, and still kind of sick from what had happened at the library. The Dragon Lady turned a page in her magazine. “I just need—”

“I’m on break.” The red-clawed hand took the cigarette out of the red-painted mouth for a trip to the ashtray to shed some excess. “Not even supposed to be here today. Damn grad students. Come back in half an hour.”

“But—”

“No buts. I’m on break. Shoo.”

“But Professor Wilson sent me to get something from his house, but he didn’t give me the address. Please—”

She slapped the magazine closed. “Oh, for God’s sake. I’m going to wring his neck when he gets back here. Here.” She grabbed a card from the holder on her desk and pitched it at Claire, glaring. “If you’re some nutcase, it’s not my problem. You tell His Highness that if he wants to roll around with undergrads, he can damn well remember to tell them his own damn address from now on. Got it?”

“Got it,” Claire said in a very small voice. Roll around with… She wasn’t going to think about that. Not at all. “Thank you.”

The Dragon Lady puffed a cloud of smoke out of both nostrils and raised eyebrows plucked into more of a suggestion than an actual form. “You’re a polite one. Go on, get out of here before I remember I’m supposed to be off today.”

Claire escaped, clutching the card in her sweaty fingers.

Chapter 13

“Y ou know,” Shane said twenty minutes later, “I’d feel a whole lot better about the two of us if you didn’t think I was the go-to guy for breaking and entering.”

They were standing on the professor’s back porch, and Claire was peering through a murky window into an equally murky living room. She felt a flash of guilt about the breaking-and-entering part—but she had called him—just before her heart did a fu

She didn’t dare look at him. Surely he didn’t mean that, exactly. That meant, you know, friendship or something. He treated her like a kid. Like his sister. He didn’t—he couldn’t—

But what if he could?

And she couldn’t believe she was thinking this now, on the doorstep of a dead man. The memory of Professor Wilson’s limp, rubbery body steadied her, and she was able to finally stand back from the window and meet Shane’s eyes without fluttering like some scared sparrow. “Well, I couldn’t ask Eve,” she said reasonably. “She’s at work.”

“Makes sense. Hey, look, what’s that?” Shane pointed. She whirled to stare. There was a sound of tinkling glass behind her, and when she turned back he was opening the back door. “There. Now you can say you didn’t know I was going to do it. Crime free.”

Well, not exactly. She was still carrying the metal cylinder over her shoulder. She wondered if the vampires had recovered yet, and if anybody had thought to question the TA at the chem lab. She hoped not. He was nice, and in his own way he was brave, but she had no illusions that he wouldn’t sell her out in a hot second. There weren’t a whole lot of heroes left in Morganville.

One of the last of them turned in the doorway and said, “In or out, kid, daylight’s burning.”

She followed Shane over the threshold into Professor Wilson’s house.

It was kind of weird, really—she could see that he’d been here hours ago, living his life, and now the house seemed like it was waiting for him. Maybe not so much weird as sad. They came in through the kitchen, and there was a cereal bowl, a glass, and a coffee cup in the dish strainer. The professor had eaten breakfast, at least. When she touched the towel underneath the strainer, it was still damp.

“Hey,” Shane said. “So what are we looking for in here?”

“Bookshelves,” she said.

“Yo. Found ’em.” He sounded odd. She followed him into the next room—the living room—and felt her stomach sink a little. Why hadn’t she thought about this? He was a professor. Of course he’d have a jazillion books…and there were, floor to ceiling, all the way around the room. Crammed in together. Stacked on the floor in places. Stacked on tables. She’d thought the Glass House was a reader’s paradise, but this…

“We have two hours,” Shane said. “Then we’re gone. I don’t want to risk you out on the street after dark.”

She nodded numbly and went to the first set of shelves. “He said it had a black cover. Maybe that will help.”

But it didn’t. She began pulling out all the black-bound books and piling them on the table; Shane did the same. By the time they’d met in the middle of the shelves, an hour had passed, and the pile was huge. “What the hell are we looking for?” he asked, staring at it. She didn’t suppose I don’t know would be an answer that would get any respect.